SGI hasn't offered virtualized-ready systems in the past, so this is a big step for the old-line IT company that has morphed from a high-end workstation provider 20 years ago into a full-time software company.

The new system, simply called SGI NAS, is part of the company's Modular InfiniteStorage product line and is the company's first new NAS system in several years. Its last home-developed one was aimed strictly at high-performance-computing environments; later, it OEMed a system from BlueArc for the same purpose.

"We've been looking at filling this hole in our portfolio for some time," Floyd Christofferson, director of Storage Marketing at SGI, told The Station.

SGI NAS includes full VM integration, even in mixed vendor environments, and can be expanded to extremely large deployments with multi-node local and remote clusters. It features support for multiple NAS and SAN protocols and includes inline de-duplication and native compression, unlimited snapshots and cloning, and unlimited file size.

The SGI NAS is built on a standards-based open storage architecture that blends the modular flexibility of SGI hardware with NexentaStor software to provide a best-of-breed unified storage solution, Christofferson said. This approach enables straightforward integration into legacy storage environments.